Tag Archives: Gnome

Installfest Part 5 (and final!)

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So I was persuaded (thanks Ales!) to give Fedora 17 another look: specifically, that I should give Fedora’s KDE a spin. I haven’t used KDE since SuSe 7.2 days, so that’s a long time ago. Practically a different galaxy, in fact. I’ll confess right upfront that I am not going to be able to do KDE 4.x justice, because it’s a huge thing to get familiar with. So all I can do is broad-brush impressionistic stuff, from (as far as I can imagine it) the perspective of a hypothetical someone who may not know their gcc from their awk, but does know they’d like not to use Windows 8 and wants lots of productive stuff easily to hand. So with all that said, how did I get on:

Notes on Fedora 17
- – Ugliest text-based boot screen from an installer disk for a main distro I’ve ever seen. See screenshot: it’s a shocker!

Not much of a splash screen here

- – The graphical installer simply didn’t have any “Next” buttons, so I was flying blind (see screenshot). Thankfully, I guessed I could use Ctrl+N to mean ‘next’, but I doubt many people would intuitively guess this:

That's a full-screen screenshot. Where's the Next button?

- – I didn’t see an option to install the KDE desktop, so the Gnome one got installed by default.
+ 3.5.2 LibreOffice (new and not OpenOffice)
+ 3.3 Kernel, nice and new(ish)
- Handbrake-gtk is NOT in the standard repositories
+ Stellarium IS in the standard repositories
+ Musescore IS in the standard repositories (though at 160M, it’s quite a big download!)
+ Keepassx IS in the standard repositories
+ Gimp 2.8 -pretty up-to-date
- VirtualBox is NOT in the standard repositories
- Opera is not installable from the standard repositories
- – Neither is Chrome (or Chromium)
+ Shotwell photomanger installed by default
+ Firefox 12 by default… not bang up-to-date, but pretty good.
- – The built-in Firewall disables browsing by Samba Client by default. I honestly don’t understand why they do this (it’s not just a Fedora feature). Fortunately, I know and I know how to fix it. Not everyone would.
- – Movie player can’t play my MKVs off the bat: but does offer to find MPEG-4 AAC and H.264 decoders. Wish it would just install them in the background (or by DEFAULT!!), really. For the auto-detected downloads then to FAIL to install (something about multilib versions conflicting and a mention of gstreamer-plugins-bad) is really poor. Fedora simply doesn’t play my movie collection.
++ Rhythmbox is the default program for handling audio files! (That will be the first distro I’ve seen where that’s the case, instead of the movie player)
++ Audio files play first time of asking.
+ Guake IS available from the respositories
- Dropbox is NOT available from the repositories
- – Gparted is not installed by default, but IS in the repositories. Meanwhile, the command line “parted” is part of the standard installation: what’s the point of giving ordinary users command line stuff and NOT giving them the GUI equivalents when they’re readily available? DVD ran out of room, did it?!
- Transmission is not installed by default, but it’s in the repositories.
- – - – Gnome 3. I still hate it. The default theme is OK, but not polished.
- – No apparent way to switch to a different desktop environment (like KDE).
+ Relatively painless to get Oracle working on the box, thanks to Gladstone.

So that was ye olde Gnome Fedora 17. Curate’s Eggish, I think: good in parts. A good selection of my most-desired software one simple ‘yum install’ away (Stellarium, Musescore, KeepassX and so on); a reasonable mix of quite-up-to-date software already installed (Firefox, Gimp, Shotwell, LibreOffice and so on); and some sorely-missed absences (Dropbox, VirtualBox, Handbrake, Chromium, Opera). They can all be sorted by various means, of course, but it’s the convenience factor we’re dealing with here, and not having them a simple ‘yum install’ away is decidedly inconvenient.

Of course, I was supposed to be using the KDE flavour of Fedora… what happened? Well, I simply hadn’t realised it didn’t get installed by default. So I had a second installation remembering to customise my selection of packages… if you blink, you miss it! Specific notes on KDE follow, therefore:

+ Konqueror… I always liked that. It’s looking a bit dated now, though. Seems odd to make it the default browser when Firefox is also present.
- Why is there a translucent square on my desktop and what am I supposed to do with it?
- Desktop effects are on in my VM, and making it run like treacle… must…turn….them….off. Phew.
- For some reason, though the network manager icon in the system tray says I’m connected, neither Konqueror nor Firefox connects to the Internet, even though I can ping www.google.com in a terminal.
- I don’t get the ‘activity’ paradigm. I can see it as a way of grouping applications, so you can build pre-populated “virtual desktops”, switch to them and have everything you need related to that project all there are ready to go. But it’s not exactly a natural way of working for me. Too rigid in some ways, too flexible in others… and I’m more used to the complete chaos of launching anything I like wherever I happen to be at the time!
- The network browser is nice, but doesn’t let me connect to my Samba shares for some reason, even though I can ping them. (Turns out the user authentication dialog had popped *under* the Dolphin file manager, so I didn’t know it was prompting for my username/password on the Samba server).
- – Audio opens in the movie player. I’m really beginning to hate that! Plays OK, though.
- – Movies won’t open in the movie player. Seems like it’s using the same movie player that Gnome uses, which is kind of pointless, and doesn’t like my MKVs.

This is just too hard. It’s like being in Paris and trying to speak schoolboy French, hoping the natives won’t mind too much. You know you’re doing it all wrong; and you know that the French have the best coffee and patisserie in the world, probably, if only you knew how to find or ask for them properly. But you can’t; and your mind just knows it’s so much easier on so many levels to stay in London and order a Big Mac. By which I mean that I can’t see that KDE is offering me much above and beyond what Gnome already gave me. I *suspect* that there’s a bazillion elegant things about KDE, but I can’t *see* them, and what I do see is just confusing and looks difficult. Meanwhile, if the deficiency in playing my video files is any guide, for example, we have a distro-related problem, and whether I run Gnome or KDE, that isn’t going to be rectified any time soon.

So my gut reaction is that KDE wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t especially wonderful, either. I was glad to see Amarok there as a future audio manager… but disappointed that Gstreamer problems affected my playback of video in KDE: where was the uniquely KDE player that would handle all my movies without the broken clunkiness of Gnome? Out of the box, KDE just felt like a different way of running into the same brick walls. I didn’t get the sense that a bit of perseverance and an open mind would help me achieve anything much.

I suspect that a purely KDE distro might not have some of these issues -might do KDE in a “purer” way, for example, where the uniquely KDE features, like activities, might then be more obviously worth re-thinking things for. But, for me, Fedora is not that game-changer.

All of which means… the Installfest is finished. Have I drawn any conclusions? Well…

Biggest loser: Ubuntu. I actually gave Ubuntu 12.04 yet another spin because I wanted to make sure my Gladstone script ran on it ok. At one point, I had a typo and the shell complained that the problem was at line 1065. So all I had to do was switch line numbers on in gedit… er, except that there’s no Edit -> Preferences menu to do that with! When you have to Google for switching on gedit’s line numbers, you know there is a profound usability issue! (Either that, or I’m stupid. I’ll vote for the former, but I realise I’m biased). Long story cut short: I think Ubuntu is appalling.

Middle-of-the-pack: Fedora, in it’s Gnome guise, funnily enough. It’s bleeding-edge enough to be useful, polished enough to be productive. Having said that, it’s installer is abysmal and it has a lot of gaps where easy access to key applications should be. Of course, it uses Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell… but if there’s a distro that could ever get that hanging together properly, it’s probably going to be Fedora at some point in the next version or three. I would definitely consider Fedora in the future, and I would possibly consider recommending it to my Grandmother as a Windows replacement… but I don’t think I could ever just hand her the installation DVD and tell her to get on with it.

Which brings us to… The Winner. The stand-out distro for me was Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very simple to set up, configure, use and enhance -with a lot of my most-needed programs available with a simple download from completely standard repositories. It looks good, behaves in boringly-familiar ways and any little niggles with its themes or placement of its main panel can all readily be rectified. It’s biggest drawback (for me) when I originally tested it was that Oracle 11g wouldn’t install on it nicely… but I’ve fixed that and my Gladstone pre-installer script now makes fully-functional Oracle 11g on the latest LMDE a walk in the park.

My only hesitation in switching to LMDE (I’m still writing this on a Centos box!) is that I have no idea where MATE is going (the fork of Gnome 2 that provides a comfortable, reassuringly-familiar interface without needing to dive into the abyss that is Gnome 3). As a fork of an old technology, though: how much future does it really have? Fedora devs calling MATE a “zombie” at one point doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence that MATE has a meaningful future, put it that way!

Of course, LMDE also has Cinnamon, a fork of Gnome 3 designed to look and behave more like Gnome 2 -but defintiely Gnome 3-based (and hence future-tech-proof, as much as anything can be). Maybe that’s the way to go: as I complained originally, LMDE’s real problem is the vast amount of choice surrounding it!

Anyway: I think I shall play some more before committing myself one way or the other (Centos ain’t broke!). But when I do, I’ll be switching to LMDE.

I tried

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I gave it a good go: Gnome Shell in Fedora 16, I mean. It’s been my main desktop for 3 weeks -and I don’t mind admitting that I struggled. And now I’ve given up.

There are lots of articles out there explaining what’s awkward about Gnome 3… I think maybe this one (plus its comments) is one of the best ones I’ve read for a while. An interesting point made there is what you get by way of auto-completion when you Google the phrase gnome 3 is:

That tends to suggest that a lot of people visiting Google don’t have a high opinion of Gnome 3 -which isn’t the same thing as not liking Gnome Shell, I realise… but close enough for an opinion piece, I think!

To add to the list of gripes you’ll find knocking about the Internet, I would add my own pet peeves:

  • I like wobbly windows and desktop cubes! Compiz (which provides them) doesn’t work with Gnome Shell, period. No desktop bling means me no happy!
  • Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down switches between workspaces (virtual desktops)… but only for the main monitor in a dual monitor setup. My right-hand monitor stayed stuck displaying whatever it was displaying before the workspace switch: it seems inconsistent. It’s certainly annoying.
  • Ctl+Alt+Up/Down to switch workspaces sometimes doesn’t (switch workspaces, that is). If I had the Nautilus file manager open on my main monitor on, say, workspace 2, then when I switched ‘downwards’ from workspace 1 into workspace 2, intending to head for workspace 3, Nautilus would appear to ‘capture’ my keypresses so that the next Ctrl+Alt+Down would actually start to navigate through my directory tree displayed on workspace 2 instead of switching workspaces. It’s tricky to describe, but damned annoying when it happens (the only fix being to switch to the mouse, move the cursor away to empty space, then switch back to the keyboard and continue the workspace switching from where it left off). Even more irritating is the fact that if you switch workspaces really fast, Nautilus doesn’t get to grab the keypresses and everything works as it’s supposed to. Linger just a millisecond too long on the workspace displaying Nautilus, though, and it breaks as described. And that sort of inconsistent behaviour is a nightmare to live with.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down doesn’t work if you’ve got a VMware Workstation session open on one of the workspaces: once again, the virtual machine ‘captures’ the keypresses so that you stop switching between the host’s workspaces and are now doing something unpredictable in whatever guest OS you’re running. As a big VMware user, that’s a major problem.
  • Clicking an icon in the application launcher visible in the Activities window doesn’t actually launch an application: if the app. is already running, it switches to that instance of it instead of launching a new one. That’s frequently not what I want! You have to right-click an icon and then select the ‘New Window’ menu option to achieve a genuinely new app. instance. This is claimed to be a feature of the new environment in the official blurb:

For many applications, such as XChat IRC, Telepathy, Evolution, Calculator, or Chess, it makes most sense to only run one instance of the application, so switching to the existing window of the application is what the user wants if the application is already running. However, in GNOME 2, the user had to know whether such application is already running before making a decision to click on a launcher to open a new window of the application. Accidentally opening a duplicate window could mean having an unnecessary extra Calculator window cluttering the desktop or signing in into IRC under a second nick. By combining the application launcher and the application switcher and making switching to the already running copy of the application the default behavior, we give the user confidence that if they just go ahead and click on the application icon, the right thing will happen.

The level of condescension involved in the Gnome developers telling me what ought to make “most sense” to me is really quite breathtaking, I think. This is definitely not the way *I* work, even if it’s the way they assume it to be. I really don’t need someone to give me confidence that software has read my mind and made the right decision for me: I want to decide for myself how many calculators or chess games I have running at once! (I have Windows for when I want auto-everything!!)

Anyway, the upshot is that I found Fedora 16 (or its Gnome Shell front-end) to be slow and unproductive. I realise that’s me probably just being old-fashioned and unwilling/unable to change… but either way, it means that Fedora 16 bit the dust earlier today. Gnome 3 fallback mode wasn’t doing it for me either, and given that I’m not about to suddenly love KDE or XFCE or any of the other bazillion desktop environments out there -I simply want my Gnome 2 back, really- I decided to go retro: Scientific Linux 6.1 is my new desktop of choice. It has at least a few years of life ahead of it, and maybe by the time it reaches the end of its days, Gnome Shell might have improved to being vaguely usable and productive! Fingers crossed.

Linux Desktops (Part 163)

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My principal desktop, as regular readers will know, is forever changing. One minute it’s Windows XP, another Windows 7… and the next it’s one flavour of Linux or another. If it stays the same thing for three months on end, it’s (a) unusual and (b) signifies that there’s something unusually satisfying about that particular OS or distro.

So maybe it’s worth mentioning (or maybe not, but here goes anyway) that I’ve been using Linux Mint for three months to the day, and I’m impressed enough by it to have coughed up some cash for it (by way of a donation) -which makes it only the second distro I’ve ever paid money for, Suse 7.3 being the first.

It is, of course, Ubuntu with some (green) knobs on -multimedia codecs already installed, for example. But I like it more than Ubuntu simply because it’s not playing silly buggers with things like the default choice of desktop (Ubuntu 11.04, due any week now, is ditching the standard Gnome desktop in favour of “Unity”) and the placement of window management icons (maxmise, minimise and close buttons are all, by default, on the right in Mint, left in Ubuntu 10+). Yup, you can change Ubuntu back to standard Gnome, and you can alter the placement of the windows management icons, but I prefer not having to.

For all that, Mint inherits the general simplicity and functionality of Ubuntu, making it a piece of cake to use. It seems snappy enough, too, and the software is usefully up-to-date.

Not everything in the garden is rosy, I suppose. Having said I disliked Ubuntu’s choice of windows decoration placement and it’s forthcoming choice of Gnome shell and X layer, I have to confess that Mint’s choice of one panel at the bottom of the screen annoys me too -and I changed it 2 minutes after installation into the more-standard one-on-top/one-on-bottom arrangement. I also ditched the special ‘Mint’ menu and reverted to the standard Gnome Applications/Places/System one -though that’s one decision I might change. In any case, these seem small cosmetic issues -whereas Ubuntu’s innovations are right at the core of what a desktop does.

Of course, this might all end in tears: the Mint team seem already to be flirting with fiddling for no good reason (with things like logos). Who knows what will happen if Mint ever stops being fun and starts being an exercise in corporate branding and recognition?!

I also note that the Mint developers seem to be toying with the idea of leaving their Ubuntu roots behind them and building themselves on top of Debian. (I know Ubuntu is itself based on Debian, but I think the Mint guys want to stop being something that’s built on something that’s built on Debian and just go back to the pure ‘source’ for themselves). That actually sounds like a good idea to me, since I happily used Debian itself as my desktop for several months… but there’s no denying (I think) that Debian is generally a little less easy, a little less friendly to use than Ubuntu -so one would expect Mint’s own scores in those areas to regress a little.

Actually, there is already a Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), and they’ve done a great job in making Debian look and feel, for the most part, just like its Ubuntu-based cousin. But it’s not quite as polished as ‘the original’ and I haven’t adopted it as my own desktop just yet. Maybe soon though, since the really good thing about LMDE is that it’s a ‘rolling distro’, meaning you don’t have ‘big bang’ releases every April and October. You just install once and keep on upgrading for ever, confident that as you do so, you’ll always be on the (b)leading edge. That sounds like something I’d want my desktop to do, for sure.

(Oh, and if you’re that way inclined, there’s also a Linux Mint with KDE version and a Linux Mint with LXDE version (I use that last one on my netbook, since LXDE is a much ‘lighter’ desktop environment than either Gnome or KDE). There’s a whole ecosystem of Mints out there, in other words, and they all try hard to be themselves whilst exhibiting general family characteristics.

I dare say I shan’t be on Mint for ever. But I like being on it for now, so it gets a hearty thumbs-up from me.

Gill Sans and Linux (part 956)

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Any reader (assuming I still have any) with a long memory will know that I have a thing about Gill Sans, the font.

Actually, I have a thing about Eric Gill, the guy who designed it in the late 1920s. He was a very strange fellow indeed! By all accounts a devout Catholic, he nevertheless found time to have an affair with his sister, sex with his dog and do a bit of child abuse on the side. Regardless, he was a great sculptor, type face designer and all-round artist. When I was in London last month, I was able to take a quick trip to Broadcasting House in Portland Place, which is graced by a great sculpture and a couple of bas-reliefs of his:

That’s Ariel between Wisdom and Gaiety, the latter of which I suspect Eric to have been overly familiar with!

Anyway, I digress.

The point is, if you’re running Linux and you want the Gill Sans font, how do you get it, because it’s certainly not baked-in to any distros I know of?!

Well, the method I’ve always used in the past is to visit the Microsoft website and download the Euro fonts update for Publisher 98 (my, how long ago that seems!) in an XP (virtual) machine and copy the relevant TTF files across to the Linux box, because that font is included for free in that update. (Similarly, you get Frutiger Linotype -another nice font, this time designed by Adrian Frutiger in the early 1970s- for nothing if you install ye ancient Microsoft Reader).

This approach is, of course, completely in breach of the license for those fonts and thus A Very Bad Thing To Do (though it works). So don’t do it (even though you can). And I haven’t done it for ages as a result of having seen the licensing light, honest!

So that option is really (morally) out of the question these days.

So what else can you do? Well, why not instead visit this website and download the blighters with, apparently, no licensing restrictions at all?! Good question… As far as I know, it is actually impossible to produce a Gill Sans font that is legal and legitimate, because the font is copyrighted up to its ears, never mind licensing restrictions. So, I don’t know where those downloads come from originally, and I’m pretty sure that they are not entirely kosher -though I could be wrong and I would hate to cast aspersions. So, download them and use them as your conscience dictates.

I suppose you could always buy the thing, too,  if you really felt like it (and had the better part of $1000 to spare!)

Either way (and here comes the technical stuff for the benefit of my forgetful brain): To install fonts in bulk (at least on Debian 6, ‘Squeeze’): copy them to the .fonts folder in your home directory (e.g., /home/hjr/.fonts), and then issue the commands:

su - root
fc-cache -f -v

If there isn’t a .fonts folder already in your home directory, just create one.

Or, you can install them individually by double-clicking the downloaded/copied/purchased ttf file and hitting the Install Font button. The downloaded files can be deleted afterwards, because this process copies the font files to your /home/<name>/.fonts file.

Spoiled for Choice

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I mentioned last time that Gnome’s principal CD ripping application is quite seriously broken. I wouldn’t mind so much, except that ripping CDs to hard disk is one of the major things I do with the home PC. So it doesn’t make me happen when my OS of choice doesn’t do that job properly!

So, as I also mentioned last time, I’ve been looking around at KDE. There are good reasons for this: KDE 4 looks spectacular; the ghastly days of its non-functional 4.0 release are well behind it; K3B is a superb ripping and burning tool; Amarok is probably the best Linux audio manager/player by a long mile; Stellarium uses a whole bunch of KDE libraries anyway. And it’s principal and default CD ripper isn’t broken!

However, KDE is quite foreign to me -I don’t think I’ve touched it since the heady days of Suse 7.1 and Mandrake 8. It also seems to be the case (if you Google around) that KDE aficionados don’t consider all KDEs to be created equal: there’s a deal of hostility toward Kubuntu, for example, as being something of an unloved stepchild of the Gnome-oriented Ubuntu project. OpenSuse gets quite a few thumbs up -except from the crowd that gives it a big thumbs down! Mandriva rates a favourable mention or two, as well. It basically seems to depend on who you ask.

The good folk responsible for Linux Format magazine, for example, did a comparative review eight months ago, and decided that OpenSuse gets their vote, with Kubuntu a close second. But if you ask somewhere else, you get told that OpenSuse’s package management sucks (which it does, come to think of it) but Kubuntu is worse, for all sorts of reasons. By the tenth page of comments, we’re recommended to use Sidux, Linux Mint… and goodness knows what else instead.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible to stick with Fedora and still make the move into KDE: there’s a KDE “respin” of Fedora available for download from the project website, after all. It’s even possible to retrofit KDE onto an otherwise properly-Gnomed version: yum install @kde-desktop will do the trick, after which you get to choose your desktop at the bottom of the standard login page.

I have, in fact, spent the day immersing myself in the Fedora-flavoured KDE waters, and it’s been a bit of a weird ride! As I say, I haven’t tried any other KDE distro in years and years, so my opinion is woefully unqualified… but I can’t shed the nagging suspicion that KDE on Fedora is like lipstick on a pig: it doesn’t really work! What’s worse, the even more nagging suspicion is that it’s not always Fedora’s implementation of KDE that’s the problem: perhaps it’s KDE itself!!

Two trivial and initial observations, for example. One: in Gnome, I click Applications on the top panel, and a nine-entry menu drops down. All items are visible, nothing needs to be searched for. Specific programs are certainly lurking underneath sub-menus, but the main menu is visible in its entirety with one click of the mouse: you can see what you’re doing and where you’re going in an instant. In KDE, by contrast, their menu pops up from the bottom edge of the screen, a la Windows, and has to be selected by hovering over an “Applications” button. The applications menu then has 15 items in it and I have to use the scrollbars to see the entire list. Two clicks and a scroll: that’s more work than Gnome ever made me do! It is no doubt one of my many peculiarities that I feel extremely uncomfortable when the big picture, the eagle-eye overview of things, isn’t readily obtainable -and hiding part of you ‘start menu’ so that you have to scroll around it is, to me, a really bad, irritating design choice.

Exhibit two is equally trivial but, I think, telling: I needed to use an on-screen calculator. Familiarity with Gnome means my arms/hands/fingers seem to know entirely by instinct that the required option is lurking under the Applications -> Accessories menus. With KDE, however, I am unsure. I guess it’s under the Utilities menu option (which is already an extra mouse-click than in Gnome, thanks to the need to click the start “orb” and “applications” option first). But when I get to that menu, there’s not a calculator to be seen! It’s all arranged alphabetically, so I expect to see it under the C’s, but it’s not there. A penny drops: this being KDE, it’s probably spelled Kalc and listed under the K’s… but no. Not there either. In the end, I find it listed under the S’s -because, naturally, it’s a Scientific calculator! I find that sort of thing extremely annoying, because it’s just so counter-intuitive: which users on this entire planet would ever -ever!- think to look under the S’s for this tool, please? Of course, you only have to learn this particular new trick once, but it surprises me somewhat that it’s actually necessary to learn it even once.

Can you tell I’m not a natural KDE convert?!

Oh, I’ve had network troubles, too -or, at least, Dolphin (the file manager) seems to have a habit of bombing out when writing to Samba shares. And Amarok has a persistently annoying tendency to prompt me for a password to the KDE Wallet. God knows why, but I give it just to shut it up. Hopefully there are no music-loving Russian mafia bosses out there suddenly just a little bit richer as a consequence. (Seriously: Rhythmbox has never asked me for that sort of thing, and any OS environment that does simply looks slightly dodgy -and quite Windows-y. If it wasn’t running on Linux, you might swear you had been infected by some password-hungry piece of malware).

All I can say by way of defence is that the desktop environment does look stunning, and I daresay these sorts of niggles can be worked around or gotten used to (and there’s a menu editor to deal with the nonsense of the “scientific” calculator!) Most importantly (!), windows wobble and the desktop cube rotates: what more could you ask for :-)

So, which KDE shall I adopt for the interim? The Fedora one looks and feels competent to my eyes -but then, so do they all. At least I don’t have to reinstall my entire OS to make use of it, though perhaps I should ‘start clean’. I can’t believe it makes sense to punt on Mandriva, given that the company is staring bankruptcy in the face for the second time, no matter how good their KDE implementation is. I’m not a huge fan of OpenSuse: it’s very, very green for one thing and, slightly more seriously, it’s package management is ghastly compared to aptitude or even yum. And I don’t really feel like wandering off to the byways and alleyways of the bijou distro (so that rules out Sidux, Sabayon and Arch). Kubuntu seems to get a lot of negative ratings from KDE insiders, though I couldn’t really tell you why.

I used to dislike Linux a lot precisely because it gave you so many choices -and psychologists know that to be a bad thing, overall, because whenever you finally make a choice, you can’t help but feel that you’re missing out on something; that the choices you didn’t make might have been the better ones after all. That sense of ‘I’m sure the grass is greener over there’ disappeared for me a long time ago: stick with Gnome on a mainstream distro and a lot of choices are, these days, taken away from you. When was the last time I wondered what the best word processor or image editor was, for example? But this dabble with KDE has already got me choosing, and thinking that whatever I choose, it’s probably going to be the wrong choice: it’s all quite nostalgic, really!

Interesting times ahead, anyway!

Sound Juicer: not so juicy

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There is a nasty bug in Sound Juicer, the Audio CD ripping application that ships with Fedora 13 (and every other Gnome distribution on the planet, I expect). First you insert a CD -and if you like listening to classical music, it is quite likely you will see a yellow panel declaring that ‘Could not find Unknown Title by Unknown Artist on MusicBrainz’. Fair enough: I usually end up supplying my own titles, artists and track names anyway, because other people submitting to these CD databases often have a peculiar idea of how to do it properly. But anyway: you finish ripping that CD; you insert another, and this time you get this:

Sound Juicer could not read the track listing. Cannot access CD. Error while getting peer-to-peer dbus connection

CD Ripping bug in Soundjuicer

Since Google is my friend, I’m fairly confident I am a victim of bug 544843, which was described back in April 2010.

I have to admit, of course, that I’ve not paid a cent for Sound Juicer and I’m not on a support contract for it either… but I still can’t help feeling disappointed that an application whose sole purpose in life is to rip an audio CD can’t do it, apparently because of some weird interaction with a music track lookup service (which is very much its secondary role in life).

You’ll note from that bug report that, apart from being able to describe what happens accurately enough, no-one has seen fit to explain what exactly is causing the problem, what the workarounds are and when a fix is to be expected.

So basically, the hot news is: Gnome desktops can’t currently rip CDs with the tool provided for the job.

I don’t really have a practical workaround, other than not using Sound Juicer. Instead, I installed asunder (a simple yum install asunder works for Fedora 13). That seems a bit archaic, but does the job. Actually, it’s not necessary for it even to do its job: if you run it, get it to find the track listing for the same CD that caused the problem for Sound Juicer, then shut it down without having ripped anything, and then launch Sound Juicer again -well, this time Sound Juicer will display the correct number of tracks and let you rip them. It will still moan about not knowing what those tracks are, because MusicBrainz is, apparently, so useless. But at least the ripping functionality will be there… until the next CD.

So the routine becomes: insert CD. Run Asunder. Close Asunder. Run Sound Juicer. Manually edit tracks and artist details. Rip. Repeat as necessary.

Which is, of course, utterly bonkers and the reason why I’m now planning on ditching Fedora. Or, at least, since it’s not particularly Fedora at fault, of course, but Gnome’s, I might just be tempted to plunge headlong into the choppy waters that is KDE -simply because Sound Juicer is Gnome’s default audio ripping application, and so KDE should be free of its curse.

I’ll keep you posted, anyway…